Origins of the School
From 1939 to 1946 New London’s Fort Trumbull was the home of the U.S. Maritime Service Officers School. The buildings housing students, classrooms and training facilities were built on land surrounding the imposing granite Fort which had guarded the harbor since 1849.
Today's Fort is the third to occupy the site. Connecticut's colonial governor. Jonathan Trumbull, recommended in 1775 that a fortification be built to protect New London. It was finished in 1777 and four years later fell to the British army under the traitor Benedict Arnold, which then burned the town and massacred the defenders of Fort Griswold across the Thames River in Groton.
The third Fort Trumbull never saw action, but was used by the Army for training purposes, and became the home of the Revenue Cutter Service school in 1910. This was renamed the U.S. Coast Guard Academy when Revenue and Life Saving Services were merged in 1915, and in 1932 the Academy vacated Fort Trumbull for its new campus on another riverfront site in New London.
A Columbia University research program addressing the German U-boat threat also occupied the premises, and was renamed the Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory in 1945 when a similar research program was relocated to Fort Trumbull from Harvard University.
Click on Harbor Defenses of Long Island Sound for an excellent Wikipedia resource about Fort Trumbull and other forts on the Sound such as Fort H. G. Wright on nearby Fishers Island.
---Brian Rogers
Below: Early map of New London harbor, ca. 1781, showing the location of Fort Trumbull on a promontory on the west bank of the Thames just below the settlement.
Below: Seth Eastman's painting of Fort Trumbull, seen from the southwest, is one of seventeen commissioned for the Capitol in 1870 by the Military Affairs committee of the House of Representatives. It now hangs in the Senate with seven others, while the remaining nine are displayed on the House side of the Capitol. They were painted between 1870 and 1875.
Below: Two postcards from the McGuire Library collection, ca. 1920, during Fort Trumbull's years as a Coast Guard station and predecessor of today's Coast Guard Academy.
